As I posted earlier, a local character I know robbed a bank and is in jail.

Bree (formerly Brian) is an odd duck who frequents my local hangout coffeehouse, and until recently was also a bagger at the local supermarket. She’s transgendered and wants the operation, and is chronically broke and works various bad jobs, or none at all.

Her obsession is Magick, of the Crowleyian variety. Any conversation with Bree will eventually arrive at a lecture on the failure of Judaeo-Christian morality and theology, the unity of Good and Evil, the power and beauty of the Occult, and some Crowleyan wisdom. She’s intelligent in some ways and can carry on a good conversation, but is narrowly obsessed on magickal transformations of various kinds. She’d spend ours at an inside table reading books with titles like “Modern Magick” (modern?) or “Practical Sex Magick”, etc.

Despite the fact that her philosophical and theological ideas gave me a sharp pain in the neck, I always got along okay with her. She was very pleasant and polite, always a big smile, and went out of her way to greet me and be pleasant all the time. As long as she wasn’t lighting incense all over the patio or talking my ear off about the Way of the Inner Something, she was okay.

I wonder what motivated this? I know she really, really wanted money for the operation, and there’s no way she was going to get it. Also, being unemployed for so long during and after the grocery strike couldn’t be fun. I just don’t get it though. She robbed a bank in her neighborhood, where everyone knows her, and then went home and waited, without leaving town or even throwing away the gun or hiding the money. She never seemed that dumb to me. Maybe she just snapped, or maybe she wants to go to jail?

The gun, too. You can rob a bank without a gun. And she never struck me as violent in any way.

Maybe the union of good and evil wasn’t such a smart idea after all. Or maybe she really, really lost it. Sad.

Our local transgendered oddball magick enthusiast, “Bree” ROBBED A BANK WITH A GUN.

Saw Concrete Blonde at the Disneyland HOB with redmaenad. Many thanks to her and her sister for making it happen.

Wow, Johnette is amazing. I hadn’t seen her play live since 1987 or so, I think. If anything she’s better. She has the pipes and the songs and a total abandonment to her art that is unique. The vocal pyrotechnics don’t sound forced or showy, just genuine. Fine, fine version of “As Tears Go By” among others.

There aren’t too many singers who can give me goosebumps, and she’s one of them.

I sort of knew her in the 80s, friends of friends thing, and I remember seeing her in my neighborhood in Hollywood a lot. She wasn’t a kid even then, and she had a presence that was notable even hung over on a Sunday afternoon at the local restaurant where we’d see each other across the room over eggs and tabasco. I was the kid writing for a paper and she was the older, mysterious rock star lady. She was nice to me.

She’s 46 now and roaring through her prime. Can I be her when I grow up? Not a note out of place, but every emotion is real.

The opening band raised a question to me: why would 25-year-olds who can play instruments want to make supermarket rock? They sounded like every cookie-cutter guitar power pop band on the Star 98 (Vertical Horizon/Matchbox 20/whatever), but they’re a bit too late for the big money train. My suggestion is that they switch to the God Team and go for Bad Christian Rock, where it’s okay to be a few years out of date if you’re cute and can hold a tune. Good money and lots of blowjobs from cornfed Kansas girls, guys. Their name was “Studio Trash”. Uh-huh. Did Daddy buy that amp for ya?

This is mostly for the1withtheeyes with whom I had a conversation about the “Geek Apology” phenom.

Canonical list of non apologies.

Supposed to have sushi with A. She was a no show, just forgot. Very apologetic.

A bit of a wound-opener but no tragedy. I had a very good sausage sandwich from the Napa instead.

The patio is empty save for some of the old lechers and a young woman who is searching for a lost object with the aid of a cop who had been on his break.

I’m back into the numb now.

The Pixies Live at the BBC is very good.

The “army” of Moqtada Sadr that is causing my country’s military such trouble in Iraq is called the “Mahdi Army” or “Mehdi Army”. This name is significant. The Mahdi, as I understand it, is a kind of Messianic figure to Shiite Muslims. One particular Mahdi figure shows up in the history of the British Empire. An Islamic revolutionary, he carried out a successful uprising against the English in Sudan which resulted in the loss of Khartoum and the famous death of “Chinese” Gordon, their obsessively fundamentalist general and governor. It took several years for Kitchener, his successor, to build a railway and mass up troops to retake Khartoum.

So here we are, uncomfortably perched in a Muslim country as Christian invaders. It’s no coincidence that Moqtada Sadr chose this name for his army. I hope for the sake of our troops that Paul Bremer is no “Chinese” Gordon.

Also, here’s how to identify the real Mahdi in case you’re on the lookout.

From LA Times coverage of this week’s fires out in 909 land:

“Police arrested Richard Drew Brown, 44, late Monday on suspicion of recklessly causing the Cerrito fire by dragging a large piece of steel chained behind his truck on Mayhew Road near Interstate 15, Riverside County Fire Department spokesman Rick Vogt said.

Witnesses reported that the piece of steel, estimated at eight feet long, was bouncing on the asphalt, causing sparks that shot into a brush-covered area off the road and igniting the fire.”

YEEEE-HAW!

The devil in Sunnyvale.

Turns out he was mistakenly “volunteered” for Baghdad duty. A woman in his unit desperately wants to go and was disappointed not to be chosen; somehow his name was on the list and not hers. She ships out June 1 for “adventure” and Chris stays here in Paradise.

My friend Lauren is 19, and her boyfriend Chris is I think 22.

Yesterday she found out two things:

1. She got into UCLA, her dream school, as a transfer student from community college.

2. Chris, who is in the Army, is being shipped over to Baghdad for a year.